musing

by zunguzungu

I had a moment, the other day, when I realized that all the writers I’m currently trying to find time to read are women. I read Shailja Patel’s wonderful Migritude in a café in Georgetown in a glorious haze of indolent luxury last weekend, and I was absorbed in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret on the plane as I flew home. And then, as I went over the list of books I wanted to read/re-read in my next (perhaps imaginary) phase of exploratory/pleasure reading, I realized that they are all women. Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (which I don‘t even remember reading, it’s been so long), Ahdaf Soueif‘s The Map of Love (because I adored In the Eye of the Sun), Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (never read), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (which I didn‘t like nearly as much as everything else she‘s ever written, and I want to figure out why), and Tsitsi Dangerembga‘s The Book of Not, which no one seems to have read (including me) despite how omni-canonized her Nervous Conditions has been. Oh, and Persepolis.

This should not be as surprising as it is, of course. There is nothing “natural” about the thing where a list of writers comes together and it’s all men, however often it happens. Obviously, in fact, the opposite is true: such an occurrence has to be made to happen, even if we don‘t realize the social pressure being brought to bear (even if we‘ve been scrupulously trained to perceive such pressure as “natural“). And, of course, there is nothing random about my list, either; I am reading particular books for particular reasons, even if I wasn’t, at first, thinking in terms of gender. There are a lot of writers there in the grey space between Africa and the Middle East, for example, the places where people like to draw lines demarcating the imaginary difference between Africans and Arabs, and a space I’m trying to better read about and in. And it may be that I’ve previously favored male writers without realizing it, leaving the important lady writers in the place where my gaps were. But still. If gender didn’t inform my original intention — or at least not in any simply, obvious way — there is something too dramatic in the correlation. I need to spend some time thinking it through.

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4 Comments to “musing”

A) When is the old blog format coming back?
B) You, the master of the pregnant throwaway comment, left me thinking about what you mean by this line: “imaginary difference between Africans and Arabs.” Have you become a continental Pan-Africanist since I last left the U.S.? Or are you finding connections between Arabs and Africans that you never saw before? You know me, I disagree, but its interesting not reading your blog for a year and seeing where your thoughts have turned to.
C) In my modern China class, outside of the textbooks, every book was either written by a woman or dealt with women specifically. The prof never mentioned this, but I am pretty sure it was to give the students another view of modern China (that is, of course, presuming they read…) and women happened to allow students that view.

A. It may come to that. WordPress doesn’t give a lot of options I like.
B. I just mean that most places where people try to draw lines between Africa and Asia (Sudan, north Africa in general), they end up making the situation really simple when it’s actually constitutively complicated. Patel, for example, calls herself a brown Kenyan, and that seems like a smart way to flag the ways she is and isn’t “African” as that word is (misleadinlgy) sometimes used. Yes to both, complicatedly, rather than a zero sum choice between. Your thoughts?
C. That’s interesting; seems the right way to do it.

I have a clear preference for female writers. I don’t know why – I realize that men can can be equally compelling and sensitive, and to think otherwise would be both essentialist and anti-feminist. But I can’t seem to shake the idea that reading books by women is somehow a feminist act in itself. I adore the authors you mentioned — Djebar, Soueif, Ngozi Adichie, and al-Shaykh. _The Story of Zahra_ is incredibly intense and disturbing but definitely worth reading. Some other obsessions: Elif Shafak, Kiran Desai, Nicole Krauss, and of course, Arundhati Roy.

Hi. Just found your website. I want to sign up for your nsteletwer but I am confused as to what color Las Vegas Nevada would be. We are getting warm weather now. I have transplanted a lot of things outside. Please let me know what color you would suggest. Mitzi

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